“枕头城堡”祝大家甲午年新年快乐!吉祥如意马到成功!
“Pillow Castle” wishes everyone Happy New Year! (…and some idioms very hard to translate)!
然后“枕头城堡”的雨溪画了一张马~ 敬祝农历马年快乐~
…and Yuxi draws a picture of horse and wishes happy new year~
[psst. you can download the game at the bottom of this post.]
Whoa. Global Game Jam 2014 happened all over pillow castle this past weekend. The team spent Friday thru Sunday creating a game that some called “weird” and others called “oh, okay”. others called it “brilliant”. i can’t source these quotes at all. don’t try. The theme for these years game jam was “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” which, if you’ve seen the work we did for Museum of Simulation Technology, was sort of, you know, up our alley.
That actually turned into a little bit of a challenge as we entered brainstorming on Friday night. We weren’t sure what direction to go in, only that it had to be pretty far away from the work we were doing for the unannounced new gamed. We went through all sorts of ideas – from the absurd to the logical – before landing on a somewhat odd premise: “What if you were Medusa, and you had to go grocery shopping?”
Mistake #1: There is a shitload of assets in a grocery store. This will come to haunt us later on.
Allen drew up the map of a grocery store because he’s practically lived in them since he was a small child. This whole project gave him mild panic attacks along the way, because he was secretly worried he had been dreaming about quitting his Whole Foods gig and going to graduate school. Luckily he’s still dreaming and making games instead. Zhengyi and Yuxi modeled and textured the hell out of our environment and characters, and Yuxi spent late hours bent over Maya animating our characters (and fishies).
Mistake #2: We didn’t have anything playable until Sunday – we had no idea what was fun.
Albert and Xiao worked on the disparate tech pieces, and we neglected to piece the whole product together because we had such a clear vision of what we were making. This was a Huuuuuuuge rookie mistake. No one has any god damn clue what they are making at a given time. Even us professional game designer magicians.
By Saturday night we had a lot of pieces but not much of a whole. We should’ve been worried. Instead we were laughing at Zhengyi for being such a weirdo:
Mistake #3: The game was too complicated to iterate on sufficiently in 48 hours.
We thought we had created a scoping issues with assets (that we were compensating with awesomeness) but in reality, we were creating just as complex of an interaction set that needed to be balanced and Allen, as the designer, didn’t have any clue how to make it fun. It controls like crap, which we will from this point forward say “is part of its charm!” The good news is, it’s pretty.
Mistake #4: Global Game Jam Judges play your game for 2-3 minutes.
Long experiences are not great for things like Global Game Jam – the most brilliant games we all played that others had made were short experiences that could be repeated quickly. Our’s was a 10 minutes slog with a minute or two of explanation at the beginning. who the hell wants that in a room with 23 other games?
All things considered, the game rules, and we had an awesome time.
We learned a lot about our asset pipeline and the limitations of some of our demo hardware. The new laptops we’re using to demo our stuff are a little on the creeper side (and we made some horrible mistakes in-engine) so we had some major framerate issues. We also learned a lot about the importance of making some decisions and running with them – and while we did that well initially, we settled into a rut halfway through and never really committed ourselves to questioning the direction we were going after the initial vision was created.
ENOUGH CHATTER! Here’s a download link:
MEDUSA GOES TO THE GROCERY STORE, ANOTHER FINE PRODUCT FROM YOUR FRIENDS AT PILLOW CASTLE
NOTE: This hasn’t been tested very much. You need to force-close the window to quit the game. Sorry <3
team pillow castle is hard at work on global game jam 2014! The theme this year is “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”.
it was a rough and tumble brainstorming session, and Xiao’s feelings were hurt (i think), but we made it out alive, and we’re moving forward with Teen Medusa Shopping Trip. heres’s some screenshots of our progress 14 hours in.
…we’ll explain more later. right now, we’ve got work to do.
onward! to global game jam glory! or psychosis!
Hey folks! Happy week two here at pillow castle HQ. It’s been another fun one as we try to figure out the nuts and bolts of our project and our goals. Add pressure from school and personal lives and the bitter Pittsburgh cold and we’re all in very, very optimistic moods at the moment.
Thankfully Global Game Jam will be here in just a few hours to wipe away our grind of a week and put us back in the swing of CREATING something. We’ll have 48 hours to build a game worth playing. That’s not a lot of time. We installed a bed in the office to compensate. I promised myself I wouldn’t use it, but hell, what do I know.
Back to pillow castle planning! About halfway through the week, it was announced the Albert’s demo (The Museum of Simulation Technology) was selected for IGF Student Showcase! Whaaat! That rules.
It means we have to refocus a little bit (this is becoming a common theme…) and make sure we are ready to man a booth at GDC for the week. You can expected to see us there in all our glory, though. We’re about to order t-shirts. What color do you think? I like pink. Yuxi likes pink. We might not ask anyone else.
We’re looking for a composer at the moment to create a theme for the new game. That process is going pretty slowly, mostly because we haven’t devoted enough time to talking to people. One of our goals next week, for sure.
Xiao & Albert are working on solving some of our current concave collider issues in Unity – they think they may have found a work-around for now, but it remains untested.
Yuxi modeled all of our assets in like an afternoon (she’s fast!) and then has spent the rest of the week delving into the technical requirements of bringing Zhengyi’s visions to life. BTW, Zhengyi’s visions are awesome. More at the bottom.
We’re working on our branding materials and hope to have them finished by the end of next week so that we can focus all of our attention on the game itself.
We’ve developed a development strategy of dividing our work into “design answers” – creating small prototypes to test technology and art that answer questions we have about our design (and eventually, our narrative.) We’re halfway through a cycle of development for our first prototype, the “toy box”, and we will be having an internal review of the final product next Friday. We hope to develop a minimum of three of these prototypes to test various elements of the design over the course of the next six weeks – a tight schedule, but one we can manage if we stay focused.
But hey, who cares about being focused. It’s Global Game Jam time in Pittsburgh here at the ETC, and we’re revving up to get down to business. We’ll be live-blogging the process and will hopefully have a cool game to share with everyone at the end of it. If I have my way, the game will have some fart humor. Don’t tell the other pillow castle, folks. I’m going to sneak it in on them…
Check out our blog for further updates from the week. There’s an interview with Xiao on there. Along with some humorous anecdotes and accidental xenophobia. And clown bashing.
Here, have some concept art for being good readers:
Pillow Castle’s tech demo Museum of Simulation Technology was just nominated for the 2014 IGF Student Showcase. Whoa. Now we have to get serious about this shut the front door. Everyone congratulation Albert with a big warm hug of contempt. That’s what he’s thinking, anyway. Poor guy.
UPDATE: albert is taking all of his stress out on the clown.
pillow castle will see you all at GDC!
I was just browsing the IGDATaiwan youtube channel, and I found a few great talks for people starting out in indie game development.
The first one is by Alexander Bruce, creator and Antichamber.
The second one is by Andrew Wang, one of the programmers of SuperGiant Games.
All you ever wanted to know about Xiao Li but were afraid to ask…
What is your name?
Where were you born?
What is your history?
what’s a fun fact about yourself?
what music do you hate?
what english word do you love?
what is your secret skill?
what is your favorite game?
who would you want to have lunch with?
what color are your socks?
and now you know more about xiao. thanks Xiao!
he’s the best, nicest graphics programmer ever.
It’s a cold Sunday in Pittsburgh. Things are quiet. Yuxi hasn’t moved in hours. Zhengyi is tapping what I think might be morse code out from his inky art abyss, and albert is lost to the will-o-wisps.
I’ve brought caffeine and snacks. A veritable cart-load.
We all have assignments due outside of the project. A few of us are working on remaking hop-scotch. It will be miracle if the team requires no crutches by the end of the night.
Wish us luck.
Ahem…. Check. Check one two. Is this thing on?
Hey! Hi. Hello. We’re pillow castle. Albert Shih, Zhengyi Wang, Yuxi Zhang, Xiao Li and me, your writer for these adventurous adventures, Allen Tingley.
Before we get down to the brass tacks of what these newsletters will be for us (and you. faithful reader and supposed supporter), we wanted to take a moment and thank everyone for the generous response we received last week. We were all on an airplane flying up the California coastline, panicked because not only did we not expect 5,000 views, we certainly didn’t expect 50,000 in the first hour. We landed, gathered our luggage, and sprinted to available WiFi. It’s been a wild ride ever since.
About the team: Albert Shih is a genius. He won’t like me saying that, but this whole thing is his idea, so at the end of the day, he only has himself to blame. Albert and the rest of the team are all classmates of mine at the Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh, PA. We all started in the same batch of lost children, and our combined love for weird stuff and making fun of Xiao led us to come together around Albert’s “Museum of Simulation Technology” demo. pillow castle was born. The rest is still history and what not, but it’s going to be a pretty rad history. Our Art Directory is Zhengyi Wang . He’s a wunderkind out of China who can draw anything you throw at him in style. He spent a while as an architect. He’s 21. Figure that all out. Our Technical Artist is Yuxi Zhang . She’s a tough character who knows how to get stuff done and persuade the rest of us to come along. Xiao Li is the graphics engineer on the team, and he’s usually busy lamenting his fate. Don’t let his self-defeat fool you-he’s a terminal wizard. Those guys have real power. And I’m Allen Tingley . I’m the team’s producer. I wrangle the whole thing together.
So that’s pillow castle.
Our newsletters will be a collection of art, ideas, and development stories collected from the week before. We hope to leave everyone with an idea of the work we’re doing (without spoilers) and with information about our production process from all fronts: the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it will get ugly with Zhengyi around.
This Week, Week 1 was a little ridiculous. Our demo exploded all over the internet, we were on the west coast, and none of us slept. When Monday came around, half of us had the flu (the other half would later contract it) and none of us had slept. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. We caught up with each other, set up our development room in the ETC (our new home for 5 months) and met with our faculty advisor, Dave Culyba. Dave rules. More on Dave to come. He’s our honorary sixth team member.
We had to rescope our idea of what the project could (and should) be after the press we received. We now had the awesome opportunity of ATTENTION!! to drive our development, as well as support a longer timeline for our team as a whole. What was once a student project with a semester of life in it has now turned into a multi-year development cycle of a full-fledged retail product. In 72 hours. It’s been a challenge to schedule.
Step one: GDC. We’ve been going back and forth about the tight schedule this will put on us, but we’re confident that whatever we accomplish by GDC will be of a high enough quality to show something off. This is a milestone event for us, and it appears that we may have several opportunities to present our ideas. Fear is the mindkiller and all of that. GDC has added the fear. We developed a 60 day schedule (every day til GDC) and began building it out.
On a larger scale, we have to be concerned with our school project requirements, which include several presentations and significant thought and retrospection. We hope to share these materials with everyone as they develop, as it’s a great insight into what happens here at the Entertainment Technology Center as well as what you can do to prepare yourselves for the situations we’re going to end up in (good and bad.)
It’s been a chore as a team to handle press and PR for the project, but things are slowly coming together. It really is a person’s full time job to get press and marketing working to their advantage, but that’s the reality of the marketplace we are entering. Without word of mouth and press appeal, an Indie title like ours has less and less chance of catching eyeballs. A great marketing campaign is the way forward, fortunately or unfortunately. We got suuuuper lucky with ours. Reddit kicked its ass. Thanks r/games!
Our new website was slow in the building but should be launching with this newsletter. It’s a work in progress, but we hope it provides some more information about our project.
After scheduling and dealing with basic PR stuff, we began concept art creation. Zhengyi has been cranking out artwork. Here’s some bits and pieces for you to see:
Xiao is deep into solving some technical issues with the perception engine. The words coming out of his mouth aren’t making sense, but that’s okay. His code compiles and stuff is fixing. I think.
Albert is developing the first series of new puzzles for the project. He spends a lot of time staring off into space. I would take a picture of it but it’s not even that interesting. His notebook is, though.
Other than that, we’re just locking ourselves in the room and producing material. We should have some more interviews coming out in the next week or two, so keep an eye out for that. We’ll also be uploading some new content to youtube soon. Our goals for the next two weeks are to get this rocketship aiming in the right direction. pillow castle has the power. we can do it. we just need to do it.
we don’t have a slogan yet. that last one was pretty crap.
pillow castle, for the future.
-allen